Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Revit 2016 - Place Rooms Automatically

If you've seen a demo of Revit MEP and Spaces or if you have used Spaces yourself then you may already be familiar with the new Rooms version of Place Spaces Automatically...called( shocking I know) Place Rooms Automatically.

This will create new rooms in all room-bounding elements on the same level with one click. It's like a shotgun blast of rooms, fill all the rooms. You'll find it on the Architecture tab > Room and Area panel > click Rooms then a button for Place Rooms Automatically will appear on the Modify|Place Room tab.

All the room-bounding elements that can define a room will end up with a room created. All the Rooms will share whatever Room Name is entered in the Properties panel when you start the tool. Their number will be increased incrementally from whatever the next available number is.

Practically speaking the Spaces version works better than this one because engineers need to create spaces where nearly all of the rooms are in the model (usually a linked model) already and the Space Naming Utility can speed up matching Space name and number to Room name and number.

If you are careful to create a list of rooms for your project in a schedule prior to having walls or at least at roughly the same time as walls are getting sketched this tool won't really help. If you import rooms from a list in Excel it won't speed up their placement because it will just blast new rooms into any valid room bounding area. It won't create rooms where rooms you've already placed are though.

If you're looking for a quick way to make rooms and don't care about naming (or other data) yet then this tool may be perfect for YOU!

5 comments:

Watch out if you use it when multi-story rooms already exist: it won't detect them (at least that's what I recall happening in my testing).

I don't honestly know what problem this tool helps solving. Personally I think we need more organized methods of data management, not machine-gun and fix-later approaches. Such as organizing your room data in a spreadsheet or database application such as dRofus, then place by going through the list of available rooms.

Yeah, automatic numbering is another one of those "its easy and fast" but in practice doesn't yield results we don't have to revisit. We seldom, if ever, place doors only after room numbering is figured out, let alone placing rooms with a numbering scheme in mind.

Seems very much like yet another example of autod*cks 'holding out' a feature for a few years, (one that they could have implemented when the same feature was available for Spaces, which are more complex objects), then switching it on, then parading it around as a major improvement, "worth the subscription fee all by itself!"

This company is NOT a good corporate citizen, and should be taken over by the users who give it so much money. Buy stock, organize the shareholders, and take over management of these pirates!

It would be better if Revit treated rooms as real objects that can be demo'ed in a phase. It would solve the majority of room issues through different phases. You'd place a room, name/number once and then make changes as necessary either by demo or placement of new room objects when room dividing elements are demo'ed or new construction.

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